Heritage Foundation interview

20 Feb, 2011

In an interview with The Heritage Foundation, Walker discusses his reasons for reducing union employee benefits and abolishing their collective bargaining rights because governments are broke and can’t afford to continue subsidizing unions.

When the private sector is paying . . . twice what we’re talking about for health care . . . it’s realistic that at a tough time, when the private sector . . . has been making sacrifices to keep people working, we should expect the same from government. . . . I saw it first hand as a county official when I tried to do things like ask for a little more from pensions . . . or even tried to do a thirty-five hour work week, as in a way to avoid layoffs, the union leadership basically said, ‘forget it, go lay five, six hundred people off, we don’t care.’ They know the power of collective bargaining forces local governments not to be able to make those sorts of reasonable decisions.